Fox’s The Gifted – It’s Serviceable. Michelle’s Review

As a lifetime fan of comic-books even I’m starting to get burned out by the genre. Fox Tv’s Gifted, is TV’s latest attempt at bringing Superheroics to our small screen. Fox only provided the pilot episode to review which means take this review with a grain of salt as we all know pilots generally suck. Yes, I love The X-Men and it’s nice to see Marvel finally bring proper mutants to the TV Landscape, but so far the efforts have felt low budget and pretty depressing. We are in for a rough ride when their supernatural comedy Ghosted had better visual flair and sfx than this. The Gifted premieres, Monday, Oct 2nd on Fox.

From the moment the characters have a philosophical debate about mutant registration, to one of the characters having the classic X-Men Cartoon theme song as a ring tone we know this is firmly set in the The X-Men universe. If that wasn’t clear enough one of the characters say “We don’t know if The X-Men or Brotherhood,” are still around.

At its heart, The Gifted is yet another mutant story set in a grim world where they have no rights and are hunted like criminals. It seems like we’re in the early years of the mutant registration act and the mutant underground is just trying to survive against the onslaught of the Sentinel Agency.

One of the chief investigators Reed Strucker (Stephen Moyer) is shocked to find out that his own kids Lauren (Natalie Alyn Lind), and Andy (Percy Hynes White) are “dirty” mutants. Along with his wife Kate (Amy Acker), he now finds himself being hunted by the very agency he was loyal to. Although, I’m sure there will be some sort of deal struck where Reed will be forced to betray his family and the people that saved them. It wouldn’t be a “drama” if that didn’t happen.

I like the idea that Reed didn’t even think twice about trying to protect his family and the pilot did a nice job of showing that this is a family that loves each other. There are some nice sibling moments and we can clearly see that Lauren and Andy like each other. We don’t spend a enough time with their rescuers to get a better sense of who they are beyond the generic archetypes and they really aren’t worth mentioning at this point. Although I think we all know Lauren will most likely have a relationship with the one hot guy who is closer to her age. Former Burn Notice star Coby Bell is Reed’s partner.

The problem with the show is, I’m simply tired of watching mutants being hunted. The idea that mutants continue to fight for humanity, despite humanity’s xenophobic hatred is one of the greatest and most tragic things about mutants and what makes them so interesting to begin with. When all you focus on is the persecution aspect it strips away everything that makes them so great, that alone the heroic aspects.

I’ll give this the 3-episode rule before rendering a final judgement, but at the moment, I’m fairly meh about it. It’s serviceable, let’s see where it goes.